Gardner
was a major founder of the modern-day form of the witchcraft religion
that has come to be known as Wicca. He was originally from Liverpool
but was descended from a Scottish family who claimed an ancestor
burnt for witchcraft in 1610. Other members of his family were also
known to possess various psychic powers. Gardner himself administered
plantations in Sri Lanka and Borneo for the British Empire while
pursuing his amateur interest in archaeology and artistic knives such
as the famous "kris" dagger. On his return to Europe he
spent most of his time on archaeological expeditions and travel, and
discovered a "past life" while on Cyprus.

Back
in England, he became involved with Masonry and the Rosicrucian Order
Crotona Fellowship, a pseudo-Masonic group headed by the daughter of
Theosophist Annie Besant. A secret inner circle of this group
initiated him into the witchcraft group known as the New Forest
Coven, on the southern coast of England, in 1939. In 1946 came his
fateful introduction to the great British magus Aleister Crowley.
Gardner soon became a Third-Degree initiate of Crowley's O.T.O.
Gardner also knew and briefly worked with Typhonian magus Kenneth
Grant, as reported in Grant's book Hecate's Fountain.

Gardner's
crucial book, High Magick's Aid, itself an early
inspiration to Mountain Center founder Michael J. Crowley, was
published in 1949 under the pseudonym "Scire" due to the
British anti-witchcraft law. The success of the book encouraged
Gardner to devote more of his time to publicizing Witchcraft, and
soon he set off for the Isle of Man to become the "Resident
Witch" at the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft housed in an
ancient farmhouse. He initiated Doreen Valiente, another modern
Wiccan author, in 1953. Gardner's high priestess initiated Raymond
Buckland into Witchcraft in 1963; Buckland went on to introduce Wicca
to the U.S. via numerous books.

Gardner
died on ship from Lebanon in 1964 and is buried in the North African
city of Tunis.

Though
some have criticized Gardner for his excessive intellectual debt to
Aleister Crowley and Masonry (from both of which he is believed to
have derived his inspiration for the three-degree organization of
modern Wicca, as well as some of its initiatory ceremonies) there is
no question that Wicca owes its existence to the literary efforts of
Gardner, and to his work to publicize it and bring an ancient
tradition into the modern world.